Challenges
by LaCasta
Summary: Darkish futurefic. Slash. Usual disclaimer. "Lex likes to challenge people." Superman accepts.


It's been like a huge rubber band between us. The further we run from each other, the tighter it becomes. The closer it comes to breaking. If either of us let go, who knows where it would catapult the other?   
  
That's not something we're likely to find out.  
  
Oh, the tension was always there, even from the start. But exciting. An underlying current. Made of so many things that, even as a teenager, or perhaps because I was a teenager, I didn't even know what some of them were.   
  
Tonight, it nearly broke.  
  
Challenge, confrontation, a partial defeat for one of us, a partial victory for the other. Neither of us has had the courage to take it to the final victory. Achilles died after killing Hector, humiliating the corpse in the most inhuman fashion possible, and then redeeming himself with that act of grace to the hero's sobbing father. Achilles had nothing left to live for without the fight. Without Hector.   
  
Which of us is which?  
  
I'm not sure my mind can grasp what he is--can grasp what we are--without metaphors. From rubber bands to the Greek epics that he loves so much. Or does he love them, after all? Or does he hate the patterns that he sees replicated so many times? Win by treachery. Degrade and destroy the enemy. Then...  
  
Tonight, I was watching for a reaction to my latest attack. Another of his labs destroyed. I made the point of carefully bringing every employee to safety, sure that it would rankle at him. Not for their sakes. Not that I'd have deliberately let them die, but what was in my mind wasn't saving them. It was tormenting him. Flaunting what he could have had. What everyone calls goodness.  
  
He knew that I was watching, and stepped onto his balcony. His eyes searched the surrounding rooftops for me, then the sky itself. He didn't see me--I was hidden from his view.   
  
I don't know what eager weariness overcame him then. Why he set out the bait he did. His face was serene but his body was all tension, like the pulled-back arm of an archer. He pulled off his shirt and let it flutter to the ground below like a plummeting bird, air through dead wings still giving a semblance of flight.  
  
I followed when he went inside. Something in me sensed that this wasn't the trap it could have been, or if it was, it was enmeshing us both.   
  
No words. No time for words or perhaps not the time for words. Just bodies and need.   
  
I could have snapped him in my arms. That knowledge was as aphrodisiac as his body itself. While I pulled the rest of his clothing from him, he stood as still as if frozen into stone, as if me lust was Medusa. One of the legends says she was so beautiful, not so ugly, that she turned whoever saw her to stone. He seemed emptied, somehow, as if his darkened soul and brilliant mind had become subsumed into the body he was surrendering to me. With which he was claiming me.  
  
I part-carried, part-led, part-drove him into the bedroom, pulling my own clothing off as I went, cursing at the fabric that didn't free itself quickly enough. As if he knew exactly what I wanted, he bent over the edge of the bed.  
  
I pulled his buttocks apart with my hands and pushed at his opening. Just that drew blood. A lover would have stopped, looked for lube, exclaimed apologies. I spat on my penis, all too aware of the symbolism, and that and the blood gave me enough to enter.   
  
Like a shark driven to frenzy, as I pushed again and again into him, I bit at his back, shoulders, anything my mouth could reach. I've always seen other people's blood, so rarely seen my own. I can still feel the give of the flesh, the release as my teeth penetrated it and the blood began to flow. His silence gave way to moans and my panting was their spent echo.   
  
When I pulled out of him completely, he lay shivering in his own orgasm. I grabbed his shoulders, already darkening with bruises from where I had seized them before, and turned him over, them lowered myself on top of him. When he turned to the side, I continued, now under him.   
  
He responded with savage scratches down my chest, which, if I had had human skin, would have left stripes of reddened flesh and blood in their path. Like a monstrous infant, he latched his mouth onto a nipple and bit fiercely, repeating on the other side as if he hoped to draw blood or elicit pain there. When he was fully aroused again, I opened my legs to him. Instead of ramming himself inside, as I had anticipated, he groaned as he entered, slowly. I wondered, even then, if he intended for me to grip him as tightly as I could, as my body wanted to, knowing that it would doubtless kill him. Instead, I spread my arms, cruciform, and gripped the mattress, my fingers penetrating that was if it were another way for me to enter his body.   
  
He groaned again as he finished and slowly again pulled himself out of me. Then he stood up and turned to leave the room, my bites marking his pale skin like the spots on a leopard's pelt.   
  
"This changes nothing, you know," he said, almost casually, as he left.   
  
I left a few moments later.  
  
It was another challenge. 


End file.
